A Life of Crime (Water Under The Bridge Mix)
by Itty Bitty Albatross
Summary: Annabeth's nothing but a thief, a low-life criminal, and she's happy that way. Criminal!AU Percabethico, Percabeth, Perachelbeth, and implied Thaluke. Rated M for underage, violence, language, and illegal behavior.


**Disclaimer: I do not own Percy Jackson and the Olympians or Water Under The Bridge.**

Annabeth started it, back when she was just a kid. She was nothing but a get-away driver, seat pulled up as far as it went, sitting on a book on the front seat and watching the windows of a run-down drugstore.

Thalia would come running out that door any minute now, with her freckled arms full of money, earrings glittering and teeth bared in an adrenaline-fueled smile. Luke—Luke with his mouth hidden behind a bandana, nothing but a streak of a scar visible—would follow behind, both guns cocked, watching Thalia's back as always, always, always.

She's here in Luke's place right now, a six-shot shallow barrels at the ends of her arms like fear being bent to her will via her steady fingers.

"Go," she urges Percy—Percy like Thalia with short dark hair and a generic plastic bag of money over his shoulder—to follow the plan she wrote and they studied in a basement. Percy drops, his feet marking the path she will step in to get back to their rust-pocked car. Percy dives for the driver's seat and she slams the door behind them as he peels away from the street.

Percy drives like a maniac, he always has, but after a certain distance from the gas station they robbed her slows down so they won't get pulled over.

No unnecessary risks, they say, as he was always taught.

Luke always said that, when Percy joined him and Annabeth two New Year's celebrations earlier to make an even trio, almost before Thalia's blood was dry on the sleep of Luke's jacket. Almost, but not quite.

"We need a third." Annabeth finally convinced Luke, who wore a black bandana instead of his old red one to honor the girl with all that honor and nothing to show for it but an unmarked grave and a broken heart left behind, gasping her name and crying in the night when he was sure Annabeth was asleep. By then, Annabeth was twelve and starting to see—after five years of guns and cars with these two—that what they did for the fun, to keep food in the cup-holders and out of a juvie system was deadly.

"Where do you suggest we find one?" Luke said, fishing the last of the lunch meat out of the package and offering it to her.

"Walmart?" She offered around the mouthful, the last she'd see for a while, and she delighted in the twitch of a smile that brought to his overcast face.

They didn't find Percy in a Walmart, though—they found him on the streets, just like Annabeth started out, like Luke may have but she didn't know because Luke didn't talk about his life before her.

He had a black eye and blood on his jeans, walking like he was pulling all his muscles in to keep from full-tilt running towards the darkening horizon; Luke pulled up to the curb and said, "Hop in", (not a request, but an order, as was most of what Luke said), Percy shrugged and clambered into the backseat.

His story was hard to wrench out—a bit like pulling teeth or yanking the nails from a boarded-up back door—but between what he resentfully let loose and what they saw when his name and picture appeared on the news that night, they managed to piece it together pretty good.

The news called him dangerous, begged him to come home and face justice like any justice would be found at home, like he hadn't just served the most justice he'd seen in years with a knife from the kitchen.

With time, he opened up, right about the time he figured out that Luke and Annabeth trusted him completely—not because they suddenly found him, a twelve-year-old off the street, to be trustworthy, but because Luke had nothing to lose and Annabeth would have followed Luke anywhere.

The three of them made a home unlike any other in the back of that van, where stories were swapped and plans laid out in cheap pens on napkins, where Annabeth would half-curl herself up against Percy and Luke would keep an eye on the door even as he dozed. That summer, they hit enough gas stations and liquor stores to fund a summer's worth of food and shelter for a few kids, for Band-Aids and hiding from the cops that would pull them in and either:

a)Convict them of something they did, but it wasn't like they had a choice, officer, or

b)Stick them in the foster care like Annabeth had been, bumped from house to house like a game of hot potato.

Don't let yourself get stuck with any of those three. Their hearts run dark.

The biggest reason none of them want options a or b?

Because, this—the panic in the storekeeper's eyes, the chalky feel of money, the power rush of knowing _you got away with it_—is fun.

Instead of options a or b, Luke did what Luke does best and forged himself an option c—learn the layouts of all the two-dime stores in the nation, learn to tell who was a plain-clothes cop, learn the satisfaction of seeing your picture, badly-rendered, on a diner screen asking if anyone's seen you.

He taught it to Thalia, and the two of them to Annabeth, and after Thalia broke the cardinal rule and _died_ Luke and Annabeth taught Percy.

.

Then the plot twist rolled around in red-and-blue lights and better trained men, up to the woods that were filled with running kids and hiding kids.

Plot twist: at the end of the summer, Luke gets caught. That scar, the one that ran like a tear from his eyes to his lips, was too distinctive to stay hidden for long.

"Run like hell," he tells Percy and Annabeth about ten minutes before the cuffs cut into his skin. They'd hoped he'd stay true to the barely-teenagers, but when the time comes he sings like a bird to escape a life in prison. He'd spend most of the rest of his days behind a set of unforgiving bars and even less-forgiving guards, but he bargains away the actions of the kids he'd taken under his wing.

Betrayal, was the only thing that sings through the two of their veins at that point.

Never mind that Luke knows their full names, knows their stashes of guns and money, knows the patterns of where they'd hit and could have handed it to the police on a silver platter in exchange for a couple more years.

They spend the next week living off what little they had saved up and getting rid of Luke's stuff. His car gets pushed into a ditch, his jacket scrubbed as clean as possible and strung up on a flagpole (the two of them labor over that for the longest time, only starting to realize the depth of Luke's story when they find the medal of service in the pocket, tarnished.

The two of them work alone together like a well-oiled machine, if one that's missing a cog. After about a year, they make the decision (and it's most certainly a conscious decision, if one fueled by glee and chemicals) to forgive Luke, the Luke they both loved.

Annabeth points Percy in the rough direction of Thalia's grave and—while it takes a while, about two weeks of rocky roads and mistakes—they find the cosp of trees where her and Luke buried her.

Two flowers are planted and left, along with a pretty piece of jewelry. A rose bush nicked out of a hotel lobby's nursery for Thalia, beautiful Thalia with all her thorns, and a thistle from the woods not far away they dug up when Percy argued that Luke, or whatever part of him was still whole and moral, died that day too.

It would have been the easiest thing, to walk away then. To bid goodbye to that past and to walk the straight and narrow, to get the help they needed. They were at the grave of their mentor and the girl he loved who died doing what they did every day for the rush, for the joy.

Addicts.

The two of them lock hands and walk back to the stolen car, hoping they have enough cash for the next tank of gas and wondering if it's worth robbing the cashier when they fill 'er up.

.

It was that summer when their relationship went from family to closer, from brother and sister to swapped whispers in the backseat rapidly steaming up. Fifteen's a little young, but twelve's a little young to be killing, too, and breaking the rules is half the fun.

It starts at a gas station, of course. A clean break—to clean, considering they hadn't robbed anything in over a month and may have been the least bit out of practice—but they weren't going to complain.

"Went well." Percy says as they speed off from the curb, as she counts up the cash and wrinkles her nose when she only finds a little over a hundred.

"Yep." She says back, distracted by the beckoning rear-view mirror, keeping an eye out for cops.

After another two blocks he yanks the car over to the side and puts it in park, and she opens her mouth to remind him that this is _not part of the plan, stupid head_, but his lips seal over hers with a degree of force she's never seen outside of him slamming a head against a counter when things aren't going his way, and she kisses back because _fuck the plan, he finally figured it out_.

"Sorry." He mutters when he pulls back and away, eyes still closed, and she slaps him playfully to see those green eyes jerk open.

"Never apologize," she reminds him, which is another rule of Luke's that the two of them took as gospel.

There's tender moments, too. When the itch for a break-in ceases, they act like normal teenagers, going out for fast food and movies, pretending they could be normal like that.

Percy likes the way she holds his hand, so different from the way she holds a gun. It's nice.

Queen's 'Killer Queen' comes on the radio and he pulls over, turning it up. He pulls her up out of the car in her jeans and t-shirt and spins her, there, on the roadside. It's an abandoned parking lot, but right now it's a dance floor for the two of them, for their feet to tangle and for them to swing to the beat.

"I love you." He reminds her, as if she hadn't already been told a hundred times. It always made her eyes light up and made them both happy, and that's what being alive was for, right? For being happy?

"I love you too." She responds, spinning back into his arms as the song on the radio ends and the annoying radio-host with the obnoxious laughter comes back.

"Come on." She pats his rear, darting back to the car before he can return the favor.

It was another year after that—a year with a lean spot when they wouldn't rob anything for the increased security, one close call with a set of cops they had to overpower, a man who just wouldn't listen and they had no choice but to put a bullet through him—when Annabeth comes up with her next plan.

"We need a third." She announces. The two of them are sitting on a bench, the space between them nonexistent yet somehow gaping; they're missing something they don't know exists, but Annabeth is starting to believe in.

Percy's quiet for a moment. He's not like her—he doesn't need to think it through, as that's her job, but he does need to sit and see how the idea of another person, another family member, would sit in his gut and along his spine.

The thought rests there, a warm pool of an idea, not unwelcoming but merely unexplored.

He misses Luke like an ache.

"Okay." He says with a deep voice, a voice forged deep by years of making it sound lower than it was to pretend to be more intimidating than a kid, so that people would fear him as they should.

"I mean…" Annabeth licks her lips, a soft flush creeping up her neck past her short, dyed blonde hair, "Maybe as more than just, you know, a partner-in-crime."

"What?" Percy flicks the end of his cigarette down to the grass where it flares out.

"You know," Annabeth takes the cig from him and sucks in a breath, "as something more. Like _us_, more."

Percy takes the cigarette back and lets that idea settle too.

It makes itself right at home next to the other one.

Fuck conventional.

"Yeah," Percy loops an arm around her and tugs her in so he can nuzzle into her hair, buzzed on the side and prickling his skin, "Good idea."

.

Easier said than done.

For one, it's hard to find another person in the world who's that messed up, that willing to throw their life and the lives of possibly innocent people on the train tracks and leave them there.

They find her almost by accident. If Percy believed in fate—not to say he doesn't, but if she is then fate's a bitch—he'd say that fate's who crossed their lines.

As it happened, he steps out of the grocery store with a wallet of new 100's in hand, and Annabeth's at his back with a gun in her (his) hoodie pocket.

Two steps forward and the red hair beckons like a beacon in the window of their car, door propped open by one painted-up sneaker, as she rifles through their stuff.

"Hey!" Percy says indignantly, making her head whip up and her body make a break for the street-side door.

Annabeth tosses the gun on the car floorboard and yanks the girl back in by her belt loop, out of the way of the truck that approaches with a blaring honk. If she'd stayed put, she would have been squished.

"Thanks." The girl breathes, and she looks like she's going to make a break for the other door but Percy slams it on her from the curb and slides into the front, turning it on and kicking it in drive before she can protest.

His eyes meet Annabeth's in the rearview mirror—Annabeth, who's currently sitting next to the redhead in a worn cut-off who's looking from them to the gun on the floor and she goes faintly pale and then red in turn.

"So." She clears her throat, wiggling away from Annabeth towards the door, and Percy slams the button that locks it before she can toss herself out onto the road passing beneath them at sixty miles an hour. "I guess you guys can't judge me for trying to grab your stuff, right?"

"Right." Annabeth says with an air of finality. Rachel looks over at her and sighs back into the seat.

"You seem awfully calm considering we're kidnapping you." Percy observes, ducking off the main highway onto a back road he's pretty sure will take them to another highway over, without bumping into any boys in blue.

"Nothing better to do." The tenseness in Rachel's shoulders betrays her, but Annabeth thinks the words are true enough and she lights the girl's cigarette when asked.

"So, what made you guys turn to a life of crime?" Rachel inquires a while later, when Percy's searching for an empty lot that won't be used for a drug exchange later.

"Lots of reasons." Annabeth says ambiguously.

.

Police Inspector Deville looks over the case file and rubs his eyes.

Percy Jackson, handsome bastard and overall delinquent. By now he's seventeen and traveling in the company of a couple of similarly-aged girls, both with their own files of escapades and sob stories left behind.

Percy? He started earlier than the others and hit harder, kind of a go-big-or-go-home type.

There were a number of papers and pictures; the one that jumps out at Deville is one of a sweet-faced smirking kid whose picture was stapled to a certificate of death warrant.

His mother, one Sally Jackson, died of a car accident. After the mother died, the stepfather Gabe (the biological father was never in the picture) took over sole custody of the boy for lack of a better relative.

According to the file, a handful of teachers suspected learning difficulties, and those were the same ones who noticed strange bruises and said 'check on the boy's home life'. No one ever did, and two years later Gabe was found dead, stabbed to death with what seemed like a pair of scissors, and the word 'smelly' scrawled across his bloody forehead in marker.

By the time the cops found him the kid was gone from the apartment, to be spotted a couple weeks later with a couple of blonde kids in an armed robbery.

Thus began the criminal record of Percy Jackson. The kids—they were children, just cold and maybe psychotic, but children—were good; never caught, until those cops down in Baltimore snagged the tall one with the scar.

Deville'd give his left arm (well, maybe finger) to know that one's story.

Then, for a while, all the cameras recorded shots of the dark-haired Percy and the tall blonde girl who nobody knew the name of by themselves. A couple times there were shots of the two of them holding hands or kissing before the actual criminal activities took place.

A regular bonnie and clyde.

Deville flips the page and sees the picture of Rachel Dare—smart, talented, affluent, thief.

She joined their group fresh out of a boot camp a judge sentenced her to after her daddy's significant contribution to certain funds.

Rachel, from everything the camera's caught and the survivor's relayed, was just as crooked as daddy dear, and she either got swept up in or jumped into that hot water surrounding those two. Although more accurately Annabeth, as she was the gear at the head of operations.

At the head of everything else, too, Deville notes when he comes across another blurry still of her and Rachel sharing a brief kiss before pulling guns on the old lady alone in the alley.

.

"You sure about this?" Annabeth asks Rachel as they crouch behind a counter. Rachel cocks an eyebrow disbelievingly.

"You're asking now?" she whispers.

"You're becoming a criminal." Annabeth points out, even though she knows she's not going to let Rachel walk out that door, not now that she knows their faces and places like she does. She'll stick a bullet in her before she lets that happen.

"A more-publicized criminal, anyway." Rachel breezes, and Annabeth has to bite her shoulder to keep from laughing and blowing the whole thing.

"That's half the fun, anyway." Annabeth speaks the truth, for those three—their names on the screen, that's a rush.

"Hm." Rachel locks onto Annabeth's eyes and doesn't let go, pinning her in place in her squatting position behind a stack of crates, and then Rachel leans over and bites Annabeth's shoulder for her, making Annabeth gasp shortly and blink, hard.

"Um," Annabeth starts.

"Don't." Rachel grins and shuffles a little closer. "Let's play by my rules, for once."

In the end, Percy gripes at them the whole drive away about how they nearly blew the whole thing, and what the hell took them so long?, and next time he'd just have to split them up and take surveillance himself.

"Won't help." Rachel leans her head over the back of his seat and rests her head there, against his neck. She kicks the money out of the way so she can scoot even closer.

"Oh." Percy swallows.

"Oh, indeed." Annabeth mutters to his side, scoffing at the stupid-heads she's with.

"Still," Percy presses on with all the force of a doomed march, "they got your pictures, like, bad. It's all over the news."

"That's half the fun." Rachel quotes, making Annabeth feel all tingly down her spine. Only half the fun lies in the discovery.

So it is to Percy, when he pulls her up into his lap one day, when Annabeth promptly stops watching some history show next to them, and life's fun again.

Rachel goes away—not like Thalia, dripping out between fingers onto the floor of an abandoned body shop, and not like Luke, dragged away by muscular men with shaved heads and idiotic morals—but of her own volition.

"We're not dealing with this!" Annabeth shouts it at her, tossing the palm-sized bag of white powder to the floor.

"You can't stop me." Rachel counters. The world feels funnier, less sharp, and maybe she'll hate herself in the morning but only as long as it takes to get the next fix.

"We can leave." Annabeth says lowly, like a threat, looking at Rachel like she's hoping she's going to make the right choice, but Rachel makes bad choices which is why she ended up with a couple of hot-headed murderers like she did.

"Or, I can." Rachel walks, head up, straight past Annabeth as if she doesn't realize she's swaying with the way her body's being racked.

She gets to the door, to Percy's chest, and she's so, so beautiful. She's already given them so much, but they're in this for the fun and the wreckage, and she's not a silver lining on a cloud anymore. He steps aside and she walks past him out the door; he wants to reach out and jerk her back like Annabeth jerked her out of traffic, but it's been six months of her by their sides fighting the bad fight, and if they don't owe her a thing.

That doesn't mean he doesn't light up a cig the second her footsteps vanish, like he doesn't hold Annabeth's hair out of the toilet after she gets sick flushing the stuff, like the two of them don't stick up a couple of businessmen just to pitch the cash in the closest river and watch it sink.

.

"I'm lonely again." Percy announces to the hotel room and the girl in the shower with the door open. It's been a week of Sundays and Percy's used to threes, the magic number of thieves—someone to watch the door, someone to grab the stuff, and someone to drive away smoothly.

"I know." She yells over the rush of water.

"You always know." He quiets down and nearly nods off, one hand on the handgun that's probably going to leave a permanent imprint on his palm.

It would match his tattoos pretty well, all the ones he has, and he wouldn't mind. He likes the idea of the forever marring his skin.

The bell over Centaur's Tattoo rings when he steps in, letting the door swung shut and the smell of bleach wash over him.

"Percy!" Chiron wheels his chair back so he can unplug the phone for a second or two. "How you been?"

"Fine." Percy doesn't elaborate, but Chiron already knows what it is Percy does for a living, for a life, and he pretends otherwise just in case. Percy does the same for Chiron, who can handle a tattoo gun like no other and also a pen for a good forgery. "You?"

"Same old, same old." Chiron nods towards the back, knowing what Percy wants because the guy doesn't come for the scintillating conversation.

"This." Percy hands over a ship he doodled on a hotel notepad, and Chiron tucks it to the side as Percy sits down and takes off his shirt.

Of the tattoos that span his shoulders, his back, the upper sleeve of his left arm, his favorite is the trident on his neck—surreal, it looks like the real thing resting against his skin.

Powerful. Sharp. Deadly. Like Percy.

"Where do we want it?" Chiron says and Percy reaches around to tap the blank space along his right shoulder.

Percy sits there and ignores the pain for a very long time, relishing in the knowledge that when Chiron's done it will look exactly like he wants it to.

"Mr. Chiron, there's a…" The speaker trails off when he walks into the stark-white back room, dark skin tinging pink at the ears, and Percy winks.

"There's a what, Nico?" Chiron presses impatiently, shading away at a sail on the front part of the ship.

"A woman here, looking for her boyfriend." Nico finishes, just as Annabeth sweeps into the room.

"Hey, you can't—" Nico goes to push her out indignantly, but she pushes back and suddenly she's pressed against the wall with her arm twisted behind her because this Nico is much stronger than he looks.

"Nico." Chiron admonishes. "She's fine."

"Yeah, Nico, I'm fine." Annabeth makes a show about brushing off her short skirt and glaring.

"What's this?" She switches her attention to the ship materializing on Percy's skin.

"It's a ship."

"Oh."

"I like it." Nico pipes up from over in the corner, and Percy notices the rings at his nose, his lip, his ears. They would be fun to tug at.

"Nico likes it." Percy points out to Annabeth, who grinds the palms of her hands into her eyes, shaking her head.

"Is Nico even cool?" She asks Chiron. 'Cool' meaning, of course, someone who's not going to see their pictures on the news and dial in for a reward.

"Nico's cool." Chiron and Nico say at the same time, Chiron giving Nico a long-suffering look and Nico smiling smugly.

"We should keep him." Percy says jokingly.

"Maybe we should." Annabeth says seriously, thinking of the way Nico slammed her into the wall and the way her wrist still feels taught and pinched.

"Er," Nico starts, like he's about to say he's not all that cool with the idea of being 'kept'.

"Just go with it." Annabeth suggests, because she knows she will always get her way, especially if there's a shirtless Percy in the mix.

Still, that doesn't mean the idea of Nico as a part of a trio goes over smooth as a well-oiled door.

"I don't like him much." Percy says when they've got some down time. "Nico seems too—"

_Young?_

_Uninspired?_

_Careful?_

Any one of them might have worked here, if he'd finished what he was saying. He doesn't, because Annabeth had fallen asleep as he rubbed her back, somehow, even though Nico is singing in the shower badly.

"Shut up!" Percy yells in the rough direction of the shower, hoping that the younger kid gets the message.

"No!" Nico yells back, interrupting his song only long enough to stick a hand out of the curtain and flip Percy off.

But when Nico comes out of the shower he's wearing boxers and Percy's old shirt and he just raises an eyebrow at Percy dismissively when Percy mentions that fact.

"Rock, paper, scissors for bed?" Nico gestures to the other twin, and Percy snorts.

"Not likely." Oldest, wisest, needs-more-room-est: it's quite clearly his bed and he doesn't hesitate to shove Nico out of the way. As an afterthought, he tosses down a blanket and one of the pillows to the steel-wool-like carpet floor.

"Thanks." Nico says sarcastically, and tosses back the pillow just for the satisfaction of seeing it his Percy's face.

.

'_Well, this is going badly_.' Percy observes of their situation. He and Annabeth are being loaded into the back of a cop car, on an illegal parking charge of all things. It's only a matter of time before the cops manage to prove that they've got a search and a dozen arrest warrants out on them, and Percy can't do anything but duck his head into the car. He and Annabeth have already exhausted all other possibilities, including shooting a cop, but he missed and the officer's going to be fine, so that's another thing to charge them with but no satisfaction and certainly no freedom.

"This sucks." Percy mumbled out of the corner of his mouth.

"Yep." She says simply, because her mind's going a mile a minute wondering where Nico is with all the evidence against them, and wishing she had a free, non-cuffed hand to wrap around Percy.

She finds an answer to her question a few seconds later with a man is pushed into the road a few cars ahead of the cops, traffic stops when the man is partially run-over, and officer #1 gets out to investigate. Officer #2 is shot before Annabeth's fully up on what's happening and Nico yanks the two of them out of the car and pulls them into an alley and beneath another car.

"We're going to get crushed." Annabeth protests, even as Nico messes with the cuffs at her back and unlocks them.

"No, we're not." Nico insists as he wiggles a little farther down the car length and starts on Percy's. "The state that guy's in, the cars aren't moving for a couple minutes."

Nico wiggles his coltish body out from under the car and starts to jog down the alley and Percy follows after he tucks the cuffs in his pocket for potential future use.

"You pushed the guy into the street?" Annabeth guesses and when he nods, she re-evaluates where she'd been tucking Nico in her mental filing system.

"Had to get you guys out." Nico hums into the dark, which sounds as if he had any sort of moral compass to fall back on. Percy knows better, knows now that Nico's just as dark and damaging as he is, and lets that feeling spread along his spine down to his toes as they jogged back to the seedy motel.

"So, what's on?" Nico says that night, toweling off his hair after stepping out of the shower. He showers every night but usually puts the same clothes on again—this time, still Percy's shirt hanging loose around his skinny frame.

"Not a damn thing." Annabeth shuts off the TV and tosses the remote to the side.

"Great." Nico tossed the towel over at Percy's head, shrouding him in damn fabric.

"Thanks, dick." Percy tosses it towards the bathroom but it doesn't quite make it, falling on the floor in a pile.

"Anytime." Nico snatches a blanket off the bed and drops to the ground. Percy looks from Nico, all dark hair and big, child-like eyes and sharp, dagger like edges, to Annabeth, with light everything and tangled hair and sweeping curves.

What's a little more danger? What's so different from robbing people for fun and sleeping with two, underage people? Why should he care.

"How old are you, Nico?" Percy stands up and takes the blanket away from Nico, and Nico's brow crinkles in a mirror image of Annabeth's as he stands.

"Fifteen." Percy meets Annabeth's eye and grins, cruelly. "Old enough."

Annabeth smiles back, getting the inside joke as always, and grabs the cuffs and the cigarettes from the inside of Percy's jacket.

Percy stalks up to Nico like a cat to a mouse, backing him up until his legs hit the bed, and then he places one hand on his breastbone and _pushes_ until Nico falls back on the bed with his mouth in an 'o' shape.

Annabeth lights up a cigarette and flips the sign on the door to 'Do Not Disturb', kicking both a wet towel and a duffel bag of ski masks and cash under the bed. They won't be needed tonight.

Afterwards, somewhere around two am, Annabeth lights up another cigarette and offers a drag to Nico, who looks a little shell-shocked.

"No, thanks." He waves it away. "Those things will kill you."

"So will we." Percy quips from where he's digging the wet towel back out to put it to good use.

"But what a beautiful way to die." Annabeth says around a mouthful of smoke.

.

A year later, Agent Deville looks back through their stuff and sighs. Another one lost to the black hole, another one who was probably circling for his whole life, as there's no missing person or evidence that this kid ever existed before a traffic light camera caught him running a red, hat pulled down low over his eyes.

At this point, with all these crimes and bodies left behind in various states of death, they could nail the kids with life in prison. The chair, if they put the right people on the stand. But the problem is catching them.

According to everyone who's ever worked a case having to do with these three, there's no pattern and no way to predict what's going to be hit next.

It's almost like they're not on any kind of previously dictated system, like people who kill certain people are steal certain things out of a compulsion.

It's almost like they don't even care about the money—it's not like they've been on spending sprees or trying to launder the money.

It's almost like they're just doing it because they can.

.

There was the one in Tenessee that funded a new car, bought off some guy for a no-questions-asked exchange

The warehouse in Kansas for the base camp. One big mattress and a couple littler ones for when they wanted to sleep separate, which wasn't very often. They kept the floor swept and money stashed under a loose floorboard, inside a false compartment beneath the cabinet, and guns on their persons or under the mattress. Home sweet home.

They don't have school, so they keep a load of books and movies and such. They spend a lot fo time inside, where it's safer, when they're not on the road.

For a little over ten years it runs like that—car, home, steal, random hotel or alley or jail cell. Never prison, never courtroom, never hospital, not even when Annabeth got her stomach slashed open and Nico had to take care of it with nothing but a needle and thread and a bottle of whiskey, and Percy kept yelling 'why is she bleeding?' and Nico had no real answer other than 'she's been slashed open, why the fuck do you think?', but she woke up the next morning and drained the bottle.

Then comes the last day.

It's drizzling on the last day they hit a place.

Overall, they made it farther than most criminals. A fuck-ton of years, in comparison to others. They're well into their thirties and have been working on bigger, harder jobs, like banks and big businesses.

Nico's tapping on the steering wheel, eyes tight on the windows and mirrors, looking for any sign of his partners. Any second now, Percy's going to come out that door with an arm full of money, Annabeth behind him with guns cocked and head down.

Except, that's not how it happens.

Percy's gasping with a hand on his abdomen, with a red blossom gently opening around his spread palm.

Annabeth's shaking like a leaf, pushing her hair out of her face with one bloody hand that leaves her hair tinged pink.

Nico's heart jumps up to his throat and tries to strangle him but he leans over and opens the door in time for Annabeth to set Percy in roughly, making him gasp, and slam the door shut again.

"Go, go, go." She rushes, clambering into the back to put the full weight of her upper body on Percy's chest, and he shoots off from the curb like a bat out of hell.

"Hospital?" He yells towards the back, weaving in and out of traffic, high paced, even though at this point he has no idea of where he's going to go.

"Hell no!" She yells back, pushing her hair back out of her face, feeling the uselessness descend upon her and the weight of the _no, not again's_ because this is just like Thalia.

By the time they reach the warehouse, Percy's pulse is slow and fading fast and the sun is starting to break ground behind the walls.

Nico helps Percy inside while Annabeth parks the car, and when she gets back she pretends not to notice the salt starting to stream down his face as he kneels next to the mattress on the floor where Percy's flopped down.

"Annabeth, I can't—" His voice breaks as he looks down at his fingers pressing at the hole to the left of Percy's navel.

"I know." She drops to her knees on the floor too, feeling the abrasive surface on her legs and she hopes they're bleeding, too. Nothing will be worth it without Percy, not ever again.

But she can't hold on to him, like smoke in a butterfly net, and right around midnight she notices that his pulse has stopped and he's not bleeding anymore.

She scoots back away from him. In the movies, they make it seem like it's still a person, still a human that you loved.

It's not. It's an empty shell of horror and reminders because this wasn't supposed to end like this—she wasn't supposed to have a happy ending but she was sure as hell supposed to have more time.

Next to her, Nico shakes with the force of unwailed sobs, she grabs his forearm with her still-bloody hands and he let loose a torrent of a wail, laden with emotion, but Annabeth is simply. . .empty.

.

They take Percy back to where Thalia was buried and give themselves blisters getting a grave dug, then they bury most of the money there.

One long, needy hug with gripping hands and shaking shoulders, and they part ways, her for the car with a duffel bag of mostly boy's clothes and a gun, him for the road with his thumb out and a smile and a revolver in his belt if he needed it.

She sets up in her own little place in the city, in the blur of people that walk past. There's no urge to hit a place, anymore, no twinge in her gut when she sees a store. She makes a fairly honest living with the designing and all.

If she works a little on the side giving some advice to kiddos who come through looking for a place to stay while they get their feet back under them, it's okay and she doesn't tell anyone. Luke would have been happy she passed along the line.

She never saw Nico again, either in person or as a face on a screen. Maybe he moved on and got better at keeping himself hidden, or maybe he straightened out and bottled up that dark side of his, or maybe he used that gun to put a bullet in his own mouth a long time ago.

She doesn't need to see him to know that Nico made the right choice, whatever he picked, because there was never a wrong answer for Nico.

She visits that grave spot a couple of times a year. Not too often, or someone would start to get suspicious of why she looks familiar and how good of a forgery job the tattooist did on her paperwork.

Lately, it's been growing over with thistles and roses, so it's been hard to get in to the area without her clothes being ripped and her skin torn up.

There's something fucking symbolic about that, so she leaves it be.

.

.


End file.
